Everything won’t suddenly be OK if we tear down statues and monuments, rename streets and schools, or even make apologies and payments to those who have suffered in the past.

It’s not like we can erase history, any more than we can pretend that humans are anything but flawed.

There are egregious exceptions where no debate is required: No one can seriously argue the merits of statues to Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot. But it’s with the others that we find ourselves swimming in quicksand.

The conundrum is finding an appropriate way to acknowledge the past in all of its complexity — warts, quirks, successes and abject failures — because if we don’t, how will we learn from the past?

By this weekend, Sir John A. Macdonald’s statue may be gone from the doorstep of Victoria’s City Hall, where it has stood since 1982, a gift from the Sir John A. Macdonald Historical Society and created by Vancouver sculpture John Dann.

On Thursday, council voted 7-1 to remove it. Councillor Geoff Young voted against the motion because there has been no public consultation, only a recommendation for its removal from a committee of three councillors and Indigenous leaders.

Among those not consulted was the society that donated it. Noting that it was council’s decision to put the statue at City Hall, society chair Michael Francis said he supports reconciliation efforts and has asked that the society be involved in discussions about a future location.

“Sometimes an appropriate location … with a suitable plaque to reflect the strengths and weaknesses of the individual, may be far more instructive for all of us than its simple obliteration from the landscape,” he wrote in a letter to Mayor Lisa Helps.

There’s no question that Canada’s first prime minister and one of the Fathers of Confederation was flawed — even he readily acknowledged his faults.

Macdonald was a drunk and a racist who called First Nations people “savages” and urged Parliament to take Aboriginal children away from their families and “civilize” them at residential schools. It wasn’t, however, his government that established the schools or passed the Indian Act. Both were done by Prime Minister Alexander Mackenzie.

But Macdonald was more than that. In 1880, he argued that Indigenous people had inalienable rights, noting that they were “the Great Sufferers” of Columbus’s arrival in North America.

In 1885, Macdonald proposed a Franchise Act only a month before the North West Rebellion that would have given Indigenous people full rights as citizens in addition to their special rights as First Nations. That legislation was scrapped by his successor, Sir Wilfrid Laurier.

Beyond that, historians generally agree that his leadership and vision were essential to the building of both a railway and a nation.

Does Macdonald not deserve at least as much credit and respect for his considerable accomplishments as scorn for his failings?

A historian by training, Victoria’s mayor is both willing and well-qualified to lead a discussion about both the statue’s eventual fate as well as what is the most appropriate lens through which to view Macdonald’s or any other historic figure’s legacy, and how best to represent it.

Macdonald’s legacy is far from the only one currently being debated in Canada, and Canada is not unique in having to face these questions.

In Taiwan, 253 statues of hero/dictator Chiang Kai-shek were removed from government buildings, schools and town squares and now reside in the Cihu Memorial Statues Park in Taoyuan.

“We don’t see (these) statues as political totems,” city official Huang Chao-jin told the South China Morning Post in 2017. “We treat them as historical and cultural heritage.”

Taken together, the abandoned statues have lost their political edge and the park is now a popular place for tourists to take selfies.

Budapest’s Memento Park is dedicated to democracy and filled with unwanted statues and plaques commemorating Communist icons such as Lenin, Marx and Engels.

In South Africa, some monuments from the apartheid era have been hidden away. But various artists have re-imagined them, yarn-bombing, shrink-wrapping and repainting them.

I would hope for a more positive fate for Sir John A.’s statue in Victoria, as well as others across the country. They deserve better.

Macdonald helped forge a nation separate from both Britain and the United States. To ignore that would be a disservice to our country let alone the man who believed that Canada could be something special, something unique and something wonderful.

At times, it already seems like we have no history. Maybe it’s because we’re too modest to be mythmakers in the shadow of America, or maybe we’re lazy.

We’re also careless about our history — even in the reporting this week on Victoria’s decision to get rid of the statue, more than a few journalists have misspelled Macdonald’s name.

As writer, editor and historian George Woodcock wrote, “Canadians do not like heroes, so they have none.”

What better time than now to change that.

Canada is at a unique juncture as we attempt to forge a new relationship with First Nations, Indigenous and Metis people, just as it was in Macdonald’s time.

Together, surely, we can find ways to honour all of our most important citizens and celebrate their contributions, even while acknowledging their perfectly human failings.